Jun 28th, 2009 by Seth
The RTsoft original “Funeral Quest” has just wrapped up a tournament (congratulations to Michael.. who’s won the last three?!) and a new one started today. (Yeah that banner really is that grainy..)
If you think you’ve got what it takes to run a funeral parlor, click here to open up for business. See the current rankings here.
Jun 25th, 2009 by Seth
Yes, I finally released a new game!
Mind Wall is a unique 3D arcade puzzler that is instantly understood, beautifully simple to control, and diabolically difficult to master.
See the global high scores here.
Features:
Don’t have an iPhone? Try the free PC/Mac versions.
More screenshots for press folk:
Jun 15th, 2009 by Seth
My latest project is finally out the door so I can talk about it!
I was the programmer of Prey Invasion for the iPhone (iTunes Link), developed by MachineWorks Northwest (who I’ve done contract work for on and off for 10+ years now) and published by Hands-On Mobile.
So what next? Mind Wall for iPhone! Actually it’s already done and submitted to Apple, more on that soon.
May 10th, 2009 by Seth
The sworn enemy of my forums have always been Spammers. But gone are the golden days of the easily machine detectable plea to buy male enhancement products in broken English – today we have something much more diabolical.
The Art Of Text Recycling
Take a look at this post to our forums:
Now, before you pour your heart into helping “Stella” achieve her dream, look at this:
Yup, it’s relevant text that was stolen from a Yahoo! Answers post.
It looks like a totally legitimate question. It’s the correct topic, posted into the correct area. Our spam detection system (Akismet) failed to flag it.
What if Automated Next-Gen spammers start doing things like:
Actually I think I have seen the above happen a few times recently. Meh, annoying.
May 7th, 2009 by Seth
My game Mind Wall wins the LD48 2-day game making competition! You can see the final results here. (I’m mrfun)
Also, I sort of forgot to announce it when it happened but I also won the 11th LD48 last year, which means two in a row for me. (Well, skipping the two LD’s I missed…)
Ok, done bragging. Big thanks to the LD crowd, it’s always a (very hectic) blast.
Special thanks to Clanlib and my game making thingy Novashell which both games used for rapid cross platform development. 48 hours rapid, yo.
But now I’m thinking… Mind Wall on the iPhone??? Hrm.
Apr 20th, 2009 by Seth
Twist your brain into unlikely shapes as you dare to engage the Mind Wall in battle. Will you be the first to work your way through its labyrinth of pain, and at what price, your SANITY?!
Yes, this is my Ludum Dare 48 hour game entry: Mind Wall!
No two games are alike in this easy to learn and strangely harmonious and gripping experience.
Downloads (Last updated 4-28-2009, now higher resolution, fixed 3d glitching on some graphics cards)
OS X version (universal binaries)
iPhone (New! With new modes and global high scores)
** HINTS **
No matter how impossible a level looks, I guarantee you there is ALWAYS a solution.
You can use Alt-Enter (Command-F on the mac) to toggle windowed/fullscreen mode.
Apr 19th, 2009 by Seth
Yes ladies and gents, the Ludum Dare 48 hour game making competition has already begun!
Hundreds of people from all over the world compete in the ultimate intellectual sport for nothing more than camaraderie, practice, respect, and… well, these funny little trophy icons we make for each other.
Do you have what it takes to design and program a computer game in 48 hours?
Watch the action here as it unfolds! The theme is “Advancing wall of Doom”.
You can watch my game (hopefully?) take shape here.
Mar 18th, 2009 by Seth
Debug in VS, play test on the real HW
Well, I’ve mostly finished up some mysterious projects and am hoping to have more time to do random junk like post here.
One of the secret missions was an iPhone port of a popular PC 3D shooter. The reason this went so smoothly is… I didn’t write it on a mac!
Two words: Visual Studio.
I don’t really have anything (major) against Apple’s Xcode, but hey, I’m just more productive with the IDE I spent the last ten years with.
I’ve had a few questions about my setup, so I’ve put together a basic framework showing how you can cleanly develop in a cross-platform way.
If you are writing a GL ES game, don’t need much in the way of the iPhone UI frameworks, and want to keep your code portable this can work out great.
Keep in mind you can basically use any C++ library out there on the iPhone with a little tweaking.
Here is the simplest GL ES project you can imagine, ready to run under VS and Xcode/iPhone – you just need to share the drive it resides on with your OSX box or vice-versa.
Here is the Programmer Readme.txt it comes with:
** Seth’s basic framework for cross-platform iPhone development **
This barebones framework gets you started by:
* Processes multi-touch input using the MessageManager from both OSX/iPhone and Windows (there is no GUI or anything, so you can only see
it is even doing anything by watching the debug messages)
* Sets up GLES for direct, fast rendering
* Handles coordinate and GL rotation when the phone is rotated (or L and P on Windows)
* Same source runs on windows, OSX/iPhone, only a small amount of platform specific “glue” is used, and is isolated
* Clean separation between shared files and app-level files, shows the organization I usually use
* Because we link to the PowerVR emulator library, we can also handle PVR compressed textures, exactly like an iPhone does
* Some helpful batch files including in RTApp/scripts to handle some boring tasksTo run included windows .exe: Double click RTApp/bin/winRTApp.exe
To compile on windows: Open the RTApp/windows/RTApp.sln file with Visual Studio 2005 or newer. You might have to set the “start in” directory to ../bin when running from VS.
To compile on iPhone or OSX: Use XCode to open the RTApp.xcodeproj file.A requirement to run on windows is to install the PowerVR GLES1.1 emulation SDK.
http://www.imgtec.com/PowerVR/insider/sdkdownloads/#GLES1bAfter installing, copy the contents of the PowerVR_EMU/Builds into shared/win/PowerVR. (You will need to make that directory..) After that, the windows version
should compile and run. Alternatively, just tweak the VS project settings to use your PowerVR paths.You should probably also locate the libgles_cm.dll and update the one I have in RTApp/bin with it as well.
For hassle free cross platform sound, I used FMOD (not in this starter kit).
Jan 14th, 2009 by Seth
It turns out my neighbors are some seriously hard-core gamers with a 60 inch screen and a penchant for alcohol. I.E., my kind of people.
We’ve got an intense Mario-Kart rivalry going and it’s only a matter of time before that 8 player game of Bomberman Blast happens…
Dec 4th, 2008 by Seth
This weekend is a chance to test your mettle in the Ludumdare48 hour game making competition, you think you got what it takes, kid?! Rules here.
Unfortunately I don’t think I do this time around, but I’ll be hanging out on IRC to motivate and hassle people as usual.
Also, for those wanting to understand the universe or (more likely) explode trying… Towlr.
